Manager – Engineering

Databases are the beating heart of every business in the world.

Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the most highly evolved cloud-native, distributed SQL database on the planet that scales fast, survives anything, and thrives anywhere. We created CockroachDB to unshackle teams from the constraints of their database. Join us on our mission to enable every developer to build world-changing applications!

About the Role

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Storage team. Storage is the team responsible for Pebble, CockroachDB’s storage engine. Storage is the bedrock of our database product, and is responsible for the safe, durable and efficient persistence and retrieval of data, on top of which the rest of the database is built. Our team develops and maintains Pebble, in addition to a number of Multi Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) APIs, iterator stack, and our Enterprise Encryption At Rest (EAR) feature in CockroachDB. The team also has a hand in the development, operation and troubleshooting of our Cockroach Cloud product, as it relates to the various storage offerings of the cloud providers on top of which Cockroach Cloud runs.

You Will

• Help engineers successfully navigate their day-to-day by providing them the resources they need, as well as access to individuals who can help them accomplish their goals at Cockroach Labs.
• Partner closely with our engineering and product leadership to set the engineering roadmap for CockroachDB and our future products.
• Collaborate with managers across teams to tackle people management challenges, but to also ensure the coordination of documentation, marketing, and product initiatives as we scale.
• Coach and provide direct feedback to your team to guide personal development and growth beyond just technical skills. Managing performance and making sure that our engineers are achieving their goals is essential to retaining a high performing team of engineers.
• Exemplify our core values of aim high and build to last, establish balance, be transparent about highs and lows, and respect. This is especially important as you begin to grow the team.
• Be excited to bring your technical understanding and product architecture knowledge to Cockroach Labs and learn more about databases
• Enjoy being involved in tech talks, community meetups, conferences, and hackathons and encourage your team to participate in events that interest them. Your engagement helps to strengthen our open-source community and increase our presence in the tech community.

The Expectations

In your first 30 days, you will become an integrated member of our engineering team. You’ll spend time learning about the Storage team’s domain, processes and people, as well as learning about CockroachDB and CockroachDB Cloud. We believe that it’s essential for you to take this first month to become familiar with our technology and our company.

After 3 months, you will be fully integrated into the team and comfortable leading the Storage team’s execution in partnership with Product and Design. You’ll have built an understanding of the Storage team’s tech stack and feel comfortable with the architecture and components the team develops and maintains. You’ll understand the team’s priorities and roadmap.

After 6 months, you’ll be up to managing a team of 4-6 engineers and starting to grow the team yourself. You will be making sure that each member of your team is working on projects that align with both our needs and their interests.

You Have

• A passion for building relationships and are responsible for the welfare of the engineering team you manage, including their professional development and growth. We’re looking for managers that want to empower the team to achieve their professional and personal goals.
• Experience working on complex technical products and have exposure to distributed systems, concurrency control, data replication, file systems, or SQL processing.
• Comfort using programming languages like Go, C/C++, Java, and Python. We use Go, but if you don’t know it, you’ll learn while you’re here.
• A solid product architecture knowledge and grasp how a variety of teams interactions’ may impact it.
• Been exposed to performance management, understanding the importance of building an effective team that can function independently, while collaborating and supporting each other.
• Partnered across departments, ensuring coordination with internal teams (e.g., with Documentation; Marketing; Product).

The Team

Reporting to Nick Travers - Senior Manager, Engineering

Nick joined Cockroach Labs in 2021, and looks after the Storage, Key Value (KV) and Admission Control (AC) teams, that collectively make up the DB Platform team. Storage is responsible for Pebble, our RocksDB-inspired Log Structured Merge (LSM) Tree implementation. KV turns multiple Pebble stores into a multi-node distributed KV store, encompassing replication, transactions and distribution. Admission Control helps to prevent cluster overload by admitting or throttling certain types of work, based on available cluster resources. Nick lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son, but hails from Perth, Australia. An avid Arsenal Football Club supporter, he also dabbles in cookery.

Isaac Wong - EVP of Engineering

Isaac is responsible for the health of the engineering organization at Cockroach Labs. He partners closely with teams to ensure we have a balanced culture that promotes quality and innovation in pursuit of our goals. Before joining Cockroach Labs Isaac was in life sciences for 16 years with Medidata Solutions where he had a front row seat on the exciting ride from a 30 person startup to more than 2000 people worldwide. But the lure of distributed, resilient, and consistent SQL databases, along with the amazing technology and culture at Cockroach Labs proved too much. When not working he likes to draw, play the piano, and search NYC for cannoli’s with his wife and kids.

Our Benefits

• Competitive Health Insurance Coverage (for you & your dependents!)
• Paid Parental Leave (with baby bucks)
• Flexible PTO
• Learning & Development Budget
• Relocation Support (as applicable)

Cockroach Labs is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer building a diverse and inclusive workforce. If you need additional accommodations to feel comfortable during your interview process, please email us at [email protected].